In a capital city where truth often appears as scarce as a balanced budget, a moment of startling clarity pierced the fog of partisan warfare this week.
Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who once navigated the treacherous currents of his own conference’s demands, sat beside former Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, and uttered a heresy against the modern political order.
“The politicians are now picking the voters instead of the voters picking the elected officials,” observed C-SPAN’s Dasha Burns, summarizing his point on the program “Ceasefire.”
“Which is bad,” McCarthy affirmed, as if stating that water is wet or that a circling vulture portends a grim lunch.
He continued, “Well, now we’re trying to make whole states decide whether they’re red or blue, and that’s bad for the country. Remember, the founders — we’re going to have our 250th anniversary this year — the founders designed it where the House you can flip every two years. It’s supposed to be a microcosm of society, closest there.”
The admission was as refreshing as it was tragic, a veteran machinist lamenting the broken loom while standing ankle-deep in its shredded product.
For the practice McCarthy decries — the artful rigging of congressional districts known as gerrymandering — has become the unspoken engine of American political decay.
It is a bipartisan sin, though often committed in partisan haste, and its consequences are etched in the weary faces of those leaving Congress and the distorted maps governing our elections.
The Supreme Court, in its 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision, washed its hands of the matter, declaring partisan gerrymandering a political question beyond its reach.
This abdication opened the floodgates for state legislatures to engage in cartography as bloodsport.
In December 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court’s emergency ruling in Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens allowed Texas’s new Republican-favored congressional map to be used for the 2026 elections, overturning a lower court’s finding of illegal gerrymandering. This decision signals a shift where the Supreme Court largely permits cheating, as the federal judiciary steps back, even when racial discrimination is alleged.
The result is a Congress less representative of the nation’s complex tapestry than a child’s finger-painting is of the Sistine Chapel.
Consider the grim arithmetic. In North Carolina, a state where presidential elections are decided by a hair’s breadth, a Republican legislator openly admitted designing a map to yield 10 Republican seats and three Democratic ones, confessing only an inability to draw 11 and two prevented a more lopsided theft.
In Maryland, Democrats performed the same trick in reverse, a governor proudly tailoring districts to favor his party. The aim is not representation but entrenchment, creating districts so safe that the only meaningful contest is a primary dominated by the ideological fringe.
New Jersey, one of the 13 original colonies, has nine Democratic districts, two that favor Republicans, and only one that is competitive. Democrats averaged 55 percent of the vote in the last seven presidential contests, but they hold 75 percent of New Jersey congressional seats.
The human cost is measured in retired public servants. More than 50 lawmakers from both parties are fleeing their seats, a mass exodus McCarthy attributes to a simple cause: “nothing is happening.”
When the maps guarantee victory, the incentive shifts from compromise to combat.
Why bridge a divide when your seat depends on amplifying it?
The departure of figures from Rep. Chip Roy to Rep. Jerry Nadler represents a draining of institutional memory, but this shake-up won’t help if they’re replaced by a chamber where the loudest voice in an echo chamber wins.
The techniques are as old as the Republic — Patrick Henry once tried to draw James Madison out of Congress — and as creatively malicious as a soap opera.
Districts are drawn to surgically remove a rival’s home, to crack a growing ethnic community into powerless fragments, or to pack opponents into a single, concentrated district.
The goal is to render votes irrelevant, to ensure that the outcome is decided not by the people on Election Day, but by mapmakers in a back room years before.
In Texas, the Supreme Court’s recent action in Abbott v. LULAC allowed the use of a map challenged as a racial gerrymander, prioritizing legislative intent over potential discrimination.
Meanwhile, the Court has simultaneously affirmed, as in Allen v. Milligan, that the Voting Rights Act bars racial vote dilution.
The mixed signals are a fog machine obscuring a simple reality: the federal judiciary is increasingly a bystander to the rigging of its own foundation.
The consequence is a House of Representatives that resembles a funhouse mirror. Voters in lopsided districts feel their ballots are worthless.
Politicians, answerable only to a narrow base, have no incentive to seek common ground. The government stagnates, the people grow cynical, and the great American experiment begins to smell of neglect and mothballs.
McCarthy is right. The founders envisioned a responsive body, “a microcosm of society,” capable of change and charged with compromise. What we have built instead is a fortress of incumbency, its walls drawn in jagged, nonsensical lines to keep challengers out and polarization in.
We have perfected a system where the only thing more contorted than the districts is the truth that they produce a democracy in name only.
The 250th anniversary of this nation approaches not as a celebration of representative government, but as a quiet funeral for its eroded ideal.
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